The Global Gas and Dust Budget of the Large Magellanic Cloud: Importance of Asymptotic Giant Branch Stars

It is still an unresolved question how much AGB stars can contribute to the overall gas and dust enrichment processes in the interstellar medium within galaxies. We start tackling this problem by using, as our test case, observational data from the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC), from which we obtain the global gas and dust budget. The photometric data from the LMC is obtained with the Spitzer Space Telescope. We have established an infrared colour classification scheme to select AGB stars, based on spectroscopically identified AGB stars. We further confirm a correlation between the Spitzer colour and mass-loss rate, which leads to a measurement of the total mass-loss rate from the entire AGB population in the LMC. Indeed, AGB stars are an important source of gas and dust.